Last week’s reflections on
Okamiden upon the
game’s qualities resurfaced an old musing regarding games. I am very particular
about the games that engross me through thirty or sixty hours. Most games, by
some aspect of their design, fail to illicit such a strong emotional response.
What are the qualities of these games? What aspect of the design of say Super
Mario 64 illicits such a strong
response whereas Rachet & Clank brings out little to no response.

The feeling of playing Okamiden is different from playing Call of Duty. I am
an avid World at War player and can easily sink a hundred hours of multiplayer
game play over the course of a year. Yet, there is no resonance with Call of
Duty. There is frustration, truimph, and overall competition. I play such
games to build up a skill set and use it to triumph over other players.
Nevertheless, victory is fleeting. Like any sport, the match is reset, I play
again. Each round is unique with different opponents, different permutations of
strategy. It is fun to play such games, but they are not fulfilling. The need to
play is endless because each round brings on the next in an endless series that
never draws up into some telos.

Massive Multiplayer Roleplaying Games (MMORPGs) come in the same spirit as the
first person shooter, abet without the sense of competition. In the MMORPG, the
player begins the game and progresses up a ladder of levels, exploring new
spaces and expanding a repertoire. In this genre (World of Warcraft,
Eve:Online, Graal), I never got into the ‘end-game.’ The repetitiveness of the
game-worlds eventually drove me away, but not before I could explore the space
where these games take place. These titles are better, but still do not
capture the sensation I find in Okamiden.

The obvious answer is that Okamiden is a single player title, whereas Call
of Duty and World of Warcraft are multiplayer title. This is a correct
observation, I only bring up these multiplayer titles as examples of other
titles I actively play and to say that while they engross my attention they
never leave me wistfully recalling my experiences with the game.

What is different?

This question, I think is much larger than I first thought. Indeed, in answering
I think we ought to dispense first with the rather clumsy system of genres that
journalists and developers have hobbled together over the years. First-person
shooter, adventure game. platformer, puzzle game. These categories define
aspects of game rules whereas I am thinking about something much more ambiguous
since this element is found in both the earliest Mario platformer to the
puzzles of Ico and combat orientated of Muramasa. Certainly, it would not
hurt to transgress the history of games to see where first this element arises.

In the late seventies with the games likeAdventure
and more importantlyZorkappear on the scene,. I wish to address
Zork since this title I do have experience with. Zork is an interactive
narrative. That is it. You read the paragraphs of text, pick out nouns such as
“mailbox,” or “rock” and then experiment with simple verbs such as “open,” “pick
up,” or “throw.” The game world exists on a sheet of scrape graphic paper or
only in the player’s mind if they have a memory for it. The text-based adventure
game eventually becomes the graphical adventure game with titles like Myst
where the player clicks about the screen. The gameplay of Myst is altogther
like that of Zork, but what once was a text parser is now represented through
icons.

How are these titles related to Okami and Zelda? They rely upon a narrative
to drive the game foreward. Gameplay exists as logical puzzles rather than
hand-eye-reflex coordination. Zelda is sometimes catalogued as an Action
Adventure title for this very reason. Nevertheless, so is Tomb Raider, Grand
Theft Auto, and God of War. Zelda shares very little in similarity to these
latter titles, indeed there is more ressonance between Zelda and Zork
then Zelda and GTA. Action Adventure is not a good definition for Zelda
because so often it is Action that is emphasized over Adventure in Action
Adventure titles.

The early Adventure games focused upon narrative since their entire world must
be expressed to the player through description and exposition. Zelda, like
Zork focuses on description and exposition particularly relating to the
exploration the space game takes place in. God of War, GTA, however, focus on
the action and in particular the actions of the protagonist. Moreover, there is
a larger aspect to the spatial arrangement of titles like Okami and Zelda.
Namely, that they present themselves as a kind of Zen Garden.

I need to find a copy of Andre Vestal’s The History Of Zelda or David Shaff’s
Game Over. The first, a gamespot article, seems to have disappeared and the
latter unavailable to me from the local library. I will have to resort then, to
wikipedia:

“The Legend of Zelda was principally inspired by Shigeru Miyamoto’s
explorations as a young boy in the hillsides surrounding his childhood home in
Sonobe, Japan where he ventured into forests with secluded lakes, caves, and
rural villages. According to Miyamoto, one of his most memorable experiences
was the discovery of a cave entrance in the middle of the woods. After some
hesitation, he apprehensively entered the cave, and explored its depths with
the aid of a lantern. Miyamoto has referred to the creation of the Zelda games
as an attempt to bring to life a “miniature garden” for players to play with
in each game of the series.”
(Wikipedia)

The Legend of Zelda is precisely this, a recreation of the natural world or a
“pocket garden” as other Miyamoto interviews put it. This garden aspect makes
the childhood encounter with nature a centrifugal aspect of the gameplay. The
arrangement of the levels intended to create the miniature abstraction of
landscapes found in the zen rock garden. The closer then that a level design
adheres to this idea the greater the calming and exploratory aspect the game
takes on. Thus we see this aesthetic in the Japanese titles of Okami, Zelda,
Mario, Ico, and Shadows of Colossus. We see this less often in the western
designs, but rather get God of War and GTA – action driven versus
reflective-driven titles. Nevertheless, western developers do approximate this
effect in titles like Elder Scrolls, Myst, or Banjo & Kazooie (in fact,
I could argue that no platforming title can have good level design without some
stumbling upon these principles).

I would call this category the Zen Garden or Exploration Game and I see
these titles as the aesthetic pinnacle of game design.

About

Joseph Hallenbeck attended the RTIS program at DigiPen Institute of Technology, studied Victorian-era literature at the University of Oxford, and graduated from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, SD with a B.A. in Philosophy and English Literature. He has worked as an interpretive ranger, naturalist, and caver for the National Park Service and is now employed as a Software Engineer at Research Square in Durham, NC.